REGINA – Prairie transportation ministers and a grain company say the Canada Transportation Act needs to be modified.
They worry provisions in the act do not create enough competition between railways and leave farmers at the mercy of rail companies. The act will soon be before the House of Commons transportation committee.
“In balance, (the Canada Transportation Act) seems to have been skewed in favor of carriers from the shippers,” said Terry Harasym, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s director of policy and research. Clauses that penalize those that file complaints whose appeals are judged to be “frivolous” or “vexatious,” or dismiss complaints that cannot prove the shipper “would suffer significant prejudice,” could stop shippers challenging unfair practices, Harasym said.
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Such interpretive clauses damage the good parts of the CTA, he said.
Create price uncertainty
It would weaken the effectiveness of provisions designed to keep the system open to competition and it would create uncertainty about what protection shippers have from what they see as unfair practices, Harasym said.
The pool will present a brief to the transportation committee detailing its concerns, he added.
The transportation ministers of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan agreed last week to make a joint submission to the transportation committee asking for changes to the act ensuring competition among the railways, which would keep prices reasonable for producers.
“In a deregulated system, you have to have something to control it and that’s competition,” said Saskatchewan minister Andy Renaud. “We see the new CTA as being not that far in promoting competition. Farmers and shippers need competitive choices.”
The ministers want the committee to change the legislation to allow short-line railways limited running rights over federal rail lines. There also needs to be a better mechanism for short-line railways to resolve their disputes with the giants, they say.
They said the legislation might not be strong enough to ensure railways will turn over lines they want to abandon to other rail companies that are willing to operate them.
CN Rail spokesperson Jim Feeny said there will be strong competition between his railway and Canadian Pacific. Across the Prairies, groups are trying to set up grain terminals and “we’re actively trying to get those on CN lines.”
Renaud said the apparent weighting of the legislation in favor of carriers rather than shippers might have been done “so that the CN still had a lot of power and perhaps, because of the share offering, wanted to protect the CN as much as possible.”
CN is being privatized later this year.
